Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
There's no searching for coherence in the raucous and rowdy Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me no plot worth revealing, no attempt to
make any sense. Laughs are all this film cares about, and it's wickedly
unconcerned about how it gets them.
More energetic and funnier than its predecessor, the considerable
video hit Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, this edition of
Austinania is an Airplane!-type cornucopia of spoof humor that takes
gleeful potshots at a wide range of pop culture targets. It doesn't
connect every time--there's no way it could--but its batting average is
gratifyingly high.
Once again directed by Jay Roach and written by star Mike Myers
(helped this time by co-writer Michael McCullers), Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me relates the further adventures of the delusional secret agent and his
equally incompetent nemesis, the shiny-suited, bald master of mayhem, Dr.
Evil.
Both men were cryogenically frozen in the swinging 1960s only to be
thawed out in the go-go '90s to face off in International Man of
Mystery. In this latest chapter of what will no doubt be a continuing
saga, the two men go back in time to duke it out once more in those wild
and crazy '60s.
The thin reed of a plot on which considerable madness is balanced is
that Dr. Evil has concocted a plan to steal Austin's libido, known as his
mojo. Waiting in the '60s to help the doctor is Young Number Two (Rob
Lowe, doing a good imitation of Robert Wagner, the original Number Two)
and waiting to bewitch Austin is agent Felicity Shagwell (don't ask),
played with the correct amount of bemusement and attractiveness by
Heather Graham.
Also new to Austin's world is the tiny, one-eighth-sized miniature
clone of Dr. Evil (played by 2-foot, 8-inch Verne Troyer) that the great
man dubs Mini-Me and immediately involves in all manner of surreal
shenanigans.
Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me throws so many kinds of things at you so
fast, watching it can be pleasantly disorienting. If the film wants to
have Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello appear out of nowhere to sing
''I'll Never Fall in Love Again'' on the streets of London, they're there.
For those who've never experienced an Austin movie, here are some other
ideas of what to expect:
* Inane sexual humor. This includes a character named Ivana Humpalot
(she's Russian, if you must know), an elaborately edited sequence
invoking nicknames for the male sexual organ that features both Willie
Nelson and Woody Harrelson, and lines of dialogue like a woman asking
Austin if he smoked after sex and the rascal responding, ''I don't know,
baby, I've never looked.''
* Toilet humor. Literally and a lot of it. With key sequences
involving bowel movements and an odoriferous stool sample, anyone old
enough to get into an R-rated movie will be hard-pressed to find this
amusing.
* Yiddish-tinged humor. As in the first film, there's a country named
Kreplachistan and a key character named Frau Farbissina (Yiddish for
embittered), making clear that Myers' heart is in the Catskills, not the
Highlands.
* Movie references and spoofs. Given that Austin himself is a spoof of
James Bond, it's not surprising that numerous other films get parodied,
including Star Wars, The Exorcist, Jerry Maguire and The Island of
Dr. Moreau. The references are dead-on but so fleeting it's possible to
miss them if you're not paying attention.
Hard to miss is Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me infatuation with The Jerry
Springer Show. In a mock episode titled My Father Is Evil and Wants to
Take Over the World, Dr. Evil's disaffected son Scott (Seth Green)
confronts the old man and gets to hear himself dissed as ''the mayonnaise,
the Diet Coke of evil.''
With humor like this all over the place, Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
couldn't succeed without a unifying force, and that has to be the protean
Myers, who in addition to playing both Austin and Dr. Evil spent nearly
five hours per session climbing into a Stan Winston-designed latex suit
to play a heavyweight villain with a 70-inch waistline subtly named Fat
Bastard.
As these films and his earlier Wayne's World demonstrate, Myers has
a singular talent for skit humor. Seeing him play both the sniggering,
snaggletoothed Austin, ''the man who put the grr in swinger,'' and the
fussy, pinky-waving Dr. Evil is to see a gifted performer who knows his
strengths and is not afraid of playing to them. You can get away with an
awful lot of gross, juvenile humor if you've got that to fall back on.
Story
Acting
Direction
Bottom Line
Hollywood.com rated this film 1 star.